About Us

The University of Rochester has an expansive shuttle and bus system to better connect its
students and employees to the University, it even offers occasional rides to malls, supermarkets,
and Cinemas in the area. People have two main systems to find out when and where their buses are
coming: the schedule on the U of R website, and a mobile application. Both of these options are either flawed or inconvenient to the user. We propose a better solution; one that addresses the problems faced by those users.

Features

Real-Time Tracking:​ View live bus locations and monitor its progress towards you or
your destination.

Arrival predictions: ​View precise predictions on bus arrivals up to the minute.

Alerts:​ Receive alerts in your browser or sent to your phone (via SMS) to know when
your bus will be arriving.

Customized Route-Finding:​ Don’t ever worry about finding the right bus to catch. Enter
a start and end address and receive customized directions to get you to your destination.

Multi-Bus Route-Finding:​ Let us do the hard work of trip planning. Our customized
directions can utilize multiple bus routes in order to get you to your destination faster
and easier.

Needfinding

User Survey: 148 Responses

Expert Interviews: 4 Bus Drivers

Paper and Wireframe Prototypes: Both for computer and for mobile

Beta Surveys: 15 Responses

Beta Interviews: 18 People

Prototypes

Visual:​ We believed it was important to give users a visual way to locate their bus. Integration with Google Maps was crucial for this experience.

Direction Finding: ​We wanted the users to be able to search for locations in and around the University of Rochester. To facilitate this, we thought a single search bar would be able to do this best.

Evaluations

iOS App:​ Over 90% of beta testers preferred an iOS app as opposed to a website

Direct Information:​ Beta testers preferred to see staic times complimented by timing estimates

Competitive: User evalutations showed users preffered URBus over the other available options